The dog ate my homework

Here’s an exchange from this past Sunday’s “Meet the Press” between Tim Russert and the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and U.S. News & World Report’s Gloria Borger:

MS. PRIEST: I think on the other question of politics, though, you know, the president is getting hammered on this, but I must say every single member of Congress has the right to go in and look at the national intelligence estimate on Iraq. They knew when the administration stood up and said, “This is an imminent peril, that we might be facing a mushroom cloud.” They could look at the national intelligence estimate themselves and say, “Well, is that really what they said?”

So while we have been concentrating on the White House, I think it’s also fair to concentrate not just the Democrats but the Republicans and the intelligence community who all had the things that are just coming out to us right now.

MR. RUSSERT: No major Democrat stood up and said, “This intelligence may be bogus.” A hundred and eighty members of the House cited the nuclear threat as a reason for voting for the resolution to go to war with Iraq.

MS. BORGER: But yet, John Kerry, during the campaign says now that he was misled. Well, he could have looked at the intelligence data.

Kerry has been complaining that he was misled on the intelligence leading up to the vote to commit troops to Iraq. But for a vote that was so momentous, Kerry put all his trust in President Bush’s estimations and did little perceivable work on his own. Here’s Christopher Hitchens in “The Gullible Mr. Kerry”:

Kerry, to take the nearest and most recent example of this mindset, was once an active-duty officer and once chaired a Senate investigation into skullduggery in Central America. Could he not have decided to inform himself and reach some conclusions of his own about the possibility of continued coexistence with the Saddam regime? Did he have to wait for permission to think, let alone permission to speak? Does he only turn his attention to these matters when there is a "drumbeat"? And when does he decide that the evidence is all in? When he votes in the Senate on a major resolution? Or when he looks at the shifts of opinion among core Democratic voters?

“When he votes” – that’s a joke, right?